Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang (10 page)

"Where is everyone?" I asked.

"Oh, everyone left to go swim across to Chappy to see if Greg drowned again," Ray said, shaking his head. "You're worse than the Mets."

My father looked up from the paper. "
Who's
worse than the Mets?"

Greg walked in from outside and planted himself at the kitchen counter, where he began to prepare himself a turkey sandwich. Then he took out a tub of coleslaw from the fridge and set it down between his half-made sandwich and the blender. "Chelsea," he asked as his darted back and forth between the coleslaw and the blender, "can I interest you in a coleslaw smoothie?"

My father took off his glasses. "A coleslaw smoothie? I'll try one of those."

Greg flashed me a big smile while I frowned at him in disgust. "Is there something on your mind, Chelsea?" he asked.

"Yes," I told him, stuffing a half-eaten blueberry pancake into my mouth. "I'm thinking of a two-word phrase. It starts with an 'F' and ends with an 'F.' "

Ray looked up from the table. "Would you like to buy a vowel?"

My brother Greg

Chapter Seven

Black-on-Black Crime

W
hen I travel to New York, I hire a big, black, British driver named Sylvan. I call him Chocolate Chunk. At the end of my trip, he always buys me a little gift and gives it to me when he drops me off at the airport. Last time I left New York, he handed me a small brown paper bag, and once I boarded the plane and was comfortably seated, I opened the paper bag to find a note that read,
This is so that you'll have me with you wherever you're driving. XO, Sylvan.
Attached to it was a key chain that held a minature hairy black gorilla.

Sylvan is a single father who worked his whole life to raise two children in the Bronx and then send them off to college. He is close to three hundred pounds, with a belly that looks like he's in his twelfth month of pregnancy and an ass the size of a Smart Car. After much evaluation I had concluded it was time to get Sylvan some penetration. Since I was not willing to volunteer my own coslopus, I decided to bring him on vacation to Turks and Caicos.

Ted was thrown for a little loop-de-loop when I listed the people who would be accompanying us on our journey to the Caribbean: our gay friend Brian, Paul, Steph, my brother Ray, and Sylvan.

"Sylvan isn't coming."

"Yes, Sylvan is coming."

"Are you being serious?"

"That's correct, and if you bring forth any more questions regarding the matter, I'll also bring Chuy."

"But why?"

"Because Sylvan is one big chocolate chunk nugget, and he needs a vacation."

"If Sylvan were a hundred pounds thinner, you wouldn't ever even have given him the time of day."

"What's your point, Ted? Am I only supposed to give the time of day to people who have their weight under control? If someone asks me what time it is, I'm going to give it to them. Are you asking if I'd be more likely to give it to a fat person? The answer is yes."

He shoved a Ruffles Light potato chip into his mouth. "So let me get this straight. Because of his unregulated diet of Cheetos, apple fritters, and Hawaiian Punch, Sylvan is going to be rewarded with a trip to Turks and Caicos?"

"Now you're catching on. Good work, Detective."

"Well, why don't you charter him a private plane while you're at it?"

"Because
that
would be ridiculous."

"Chelsea, why do you always have to bring random people on vacation with us? This is my vacation, too, remember?"

"Oh, please!" I wailed. I had hit a wall and was weary of being persecuted for trying to do something nice for a fat friend. "You are living the high life! You whole life is a vacation. I toil my blood, sweat, and tears every day on this silly TV show for your silly network, and then I get on a plane every weekend to fly to some godforsaken city to perform stand-up, and on top of that I have to write another one of these stupid books!" By this point I was clutching my chest like Scarlett in a scene out of
Gone with the Wind
. "And what do you do? You sit around in an office all day, and the biggest decision you have to make is deciding whether or not one of the Kardashians should go full term on one of their pregnancies!"

"All right, Chelsea, would you just calm down already?" he said with a flutter of his chip, walking out of the room. "Go take a laxative or something."

"I'll go away with Sylvan by myself!" I bellowed.

He reappeared in the living room. "You
would
go away with Sylvan alone by yourself. You would do it just to be funny. You would think that's
hilarious
."

"You're absolutely right, Ted," I told him, contemplating the idea. "If I were you, I'd watch yourself."

"Can I just ask you one thing? Why can't we ever go on vacation alone for once, Chelsea? You, me, and Eva?"

"Don't worry. Eva's coming too. I forgot to mention her."

Eva is basically my consigliere and travels with me everywhere I go, because she has her shit together and I do not. I prefer to travel like a white rapper, with many people in tow, and Eva makes this possible. Eva thinks of things no one who wasn't a little insane would think of. She carries a plastic rolling travel bag that holds everything from Q-tips to fat-free cooking spray in three-ounce mini-containers. Once, when Eva, Ted, and I were on a plane from Los Angeles to Miami, I spilled a Bloody Mary, and Eva pulled out some sort of giant paper towel that was absorbent enough to clean up a miscarriage.

"Is that a ShamWow?" Ted exclaimed, spitting his own drink into the seat back ahead of him. "Eva, this is why you're a genius. I just ordered one of those off DR last night."

"Okay, calm down, Ted. What the hell is DR?"

"It's Direct Response, genius. You call 1-800 and they send you stuff."

"No, Ted,
you
call 1-800 and they send you stuff. You, Suzanne Somers, and Ralph Macchio." I put my hand over his mouth and turned to Eva. "Eva, what is that thing?"

"It
is
a ShamWow," she roared, winking at Ted as if he had just put the finishing touches on a Mr. Potato Head. "It's really good for cleaning up messes." Then she got down on her knees and started patting my lap.

"Thank you," I said, grabbing it from her hands. I looked around to see if any other passengers were staring. "You do not have to wipe my lap. Please get up." The problem with Eva is that she insists on doing all the little menial things for me, and when you tell her she doesn't need to, it becomes a discussion, so it's easier to let her just do it in the first place.

Ted loves Eva and thinks her doing things like unpacking my underwear or carrying around five different types of Lean Pockets in her purse is acceptable. He has been a CEO for years and is used to people fawning all over him. He sees nothing wrong with calling his assistant at nine o'clock on a Saturday morning in L.A. to ask her what the weather is like in Rio de Janeiro. Between Eva and Ted, my uselessness had hit an all-time high; there's a strong chance that at this point in my life I wouldn't be able to defrost an ice cube.

"The problem, Ted," I would tell him, "is that I think she might hide a body if I asked her to."

"
That's
the kind of person you want working for you, Chelsea."

I met Eva in Denver at a comedy club and harassed her until she agreed to move to Los Angeles and work on my show. When she first came, she stayed with Ted and me for a couple of months until she found her own place, at which point Ted attempted to convince her to move in with us permanently.

"No fucking way," I told him. "I'm already living through this hell--there's no way I am going to allow another person to give up her freedom, too."

Eva and Sylvan have always had a special bond, and it grew even more special on our first day on Turks and Caicos, when, during a boat charter, the group jumped into the water and Eva was the first person to realize that Sylvan couldn't swim. Paul, who stayed on board like me, was focused on photographing Stephanie trying to avoid getting her cigarettes wet.

"Aw, fuck!" I said, looking at Sylvan sinking in the water. I ran and got a life ring and threw it at him. Eva swam over to him and grabbed his bear claw of a hand to try to drag him the three feet to the boat's stepladder, but he was flailing his arms and, in a panic, tossed the life ring away from him. I hadn't seen a look of fear this intense since I tried to squeeze Chuy into my compost bin.

"Sylvan, swim!" Steph yelled from a few feet away, waving one hand while the other held her lit American Spirit.

"Don't panic, Sylvan," Eva said calmly as she struggled to keep one side of her face afloat while the other side was being submerged under Sylvan's head, which can weigh eleven to thirteen pounds, depending on how many times he's gone to the bathroom that week.

With Eva's help, Sylvan was able to clutch the bottom of the ladder, where he sat panting. Ted was putting on his flippers and snorkel mask, unaware of the entire episode because his earphones were in.

We had stopped the boat right there when the captain had spotted a dolphin. Luckily for Chocolate Chunk, instead of acting impulsively, I grabbed the dolphin net I'd brought from California and was able to secure it around Sylvan's head.

Paul handed Sylvan a Pellegrino and took a picture of him drinking it. "Sylvan, can you swim?" Paul screamed two inches from Sylvan's face. My friend Paul is obsessed with pictures and is constantly documenting anything that takes place, whether people are cooperating or not.

I elbowed Paul in the ribs and whispered for him to shut his trap. The truth was that it
was
a good question. But the answer was obviously no. If at some point Sylvan had known how to swim, he certainly wasn't able to connect the dots now. Why he would jump into the middle of the ocean and all of a sudden start swimming
was
a little questionable. It was possilble that Sylvan had spent so much time driving on land that maybe he forgot there was a different format for the ocean. In any case, he was clearly embarrassed, and I just wanted him safely back on deck, or in the shallow end of any pool.

This turn of events was a huge blow to me, as I saw this trip as the perfect opportunity to capture some uncommon sea life for our new aquarium. My original idea was to fill it with Maine lobsters and some Chilean sea bass; when we had people over for dinner, they could just spear what they wanted from the tank and everything would be fresh like at Red Lobster. Ted vetoed this idea for some Health Department code that I'm sure he made up, and that's when I came up with my airtight plan to house a single dolphin. The very mention of dolphin fostering sparked a huge debate between Ted and me about the difference between a fish and a water mammal. His argument was that there was no point in lodging a fish if it was something that could survive on land.

"No fish can survive on land," I informed him. "They're called fish because they live in the fucking sea. Unless a lobster hops out of the Long Island Sound and porks a chimpanzee at a zoo in Florida, there is never going to be a fish that survives on land. You got that, Captain Stubing?"

After many vigorous debates and much lengthy consideration, I emerged victorious when Ted finally agreed to a single dolphin on the condition that I do not get it from a vendor but have to capture it myself.

I knew that Ted thought he had put one over on me by making such a demand, but not one to ever under-estimate myself, I made contact with several employees at the Atlantis in Bahamas, as well as the VP of marketing at StarKist and was piece by piece putting together a dolphin-abduction strategy.

Once we got to the beach where we were having our lunch, the captain of the boat pulled up nice and close to the shore so Sylvan could walk out. Eva and Steph spent the next three hours giving Sylvan swimming lessons while Paul forked over the $150 he bet me that Sylvan was never coming to Turks and Caicos in the first place.

"Is this one of her jokes?" Paul asked Ted when we all got to the island. "Is Sylvan really coming?"

"I don't know, maybe. I think he's coming, but I don't even know what's real and what isn't anymore. Three weeks ago she convinced me that it was legal to have an alligator dwell with you as long as you create a swamplike environment in a spare bedroom."

"Well, Ted, that is a little ridiculous. Why would you believe that?"

"Because she had the story so perfectly ironed out
and
she had convinced me there were alligator animal shelters, which I still think might be true."

"I think that
might
actually be true," my brother Ray said.

"Neither is true, you idiots," I chimed in.

By this point Ted's reality had become so warped he didn't even know what was reality and what was fantasy. I felt good about my position in the world, and I felt even better that I had developed so much mistrust among my close friends that they were constantly confused and disoriented.

The truth of the matter was this: I wanted Sylvan to experience the kind of vacation that in recent years I had become lucky enough to afford.
Of course
penetration was at the forefront of my mind, but I've learned through previous experiences that while trying to get someone else penetrated is ultimately an altruistic endeavor, it can be exhausting and, more often than not, fruitless. By the end of the week, I had given up my sexual aspirations for him and focused on enjoying our time together and, more important, enjoying the splendor of watching his Chocolate Chunk mess of a body wade around like a rhinoceros in a one-piece.

"I love you, Sylvan," I'd tell him as I swam into his arms and held on to his tits.

"I love you, too, Chels."

On our very last day on the island, we were all sitting in the lounge area of the pool when Steph noticed two Mocha Mamas sipping on mai tais. They were a little drunk, and Stephanie was very drunk, seeing as she hadn't left the pool bar for seven hours and was now chain-smoking while simultaneously making arrangements to move in with the Filipino bartender, who had casually mentioned that he always wanted to visit Los Angeles, more specifically, the La Brea Tar Pits.

Steph and I swam over and said hello to her new friends Feliqua and Wendy.

"You look familiar," Feliqua told me, and Wendy nodded in agreement. "Are you that lady on the TV? Tracy Lately?"

"That's right," I said, and then took Stephanie's lit cigarette from her hand and put it out in her drink while she was focusing her attention on our new friends. "Steph, did you tell the ladies about the dolphin we saw snorkeling and how you were unable to submerge your head underwater because you refused to put out your American Spirit?"

Paul swam up right behind me. "Stephanie! I didn't know you smoked!"

Stephanie ignored Paul and started looking for her cigarette. Feliqua announced that it was her fortieth-birthday celebration. She then led us in a very special rendition of "Happy Birthday" to herself, and afterward, Steph and Brian interrogated both of the ladies about what kind of men they were into. By this time the women had nicknamed Brian "Delicious" because he's gay, from the South, and has two basketballs for an ass that sit about a half inch under his shoulders.